The Furious Five: An Introduction

So in addition to the characters I normally play, I'm also part of something called a static group. I don't know if this is already a widely used term, but if it isn't I'm inventing it now.

Static Group: A group of characters who are specifically set aside for the purpose of playing with one another.

I belong to a five man static group that I've played with for months now. It's five players, most of which are IRL friends of mine, and we get together about once every two weeks and run an instance.

That's it.

We've never levelled any other way since we were old enough to run Ragefire Chasm at level 13. We're now around level 60, so it's been a long trip--but with plenty of rest experience, it goes surprisingly smoothly. And it's fun--I have my main and my alts to play when I want to do something by myself, but I always get the chance to run an instance with my close friends every week or two. I strongly recommend it for anyone who has friends.

There are a lot of interesting things about playing your characters this way. For one thing, my gear is really pretty exceptional. I'm constantly doing instances for everything, so I have a ton of instance rares and even a few epics. And when there are gaps in that gear, instances have a higher than normal uncommon item drop rate, so even without quest rewards we have a steady supply of greens dropping to fill in any gaps that we can't fill with blues. So overall, our gear is pretty awesome--242 spell power is not too shabby for a fresh 60.

What's really interesting to me, though, is that when you're playing this way you can treat every instance like a raid. I can min/max my talents to an absurd degree. Most importantly, I never have to solo. If offered a choice between a piece of gear with 10 spell power on it, and one with 20 stamina, I'll take the spell power--because I never go anywhere without a fully geared, competent protection warrior to tank for me, and a fully geared, competent priest to keep me alive. I can skip all the survivability talents (this is my current spec), because I don't need them--I can focus exclusively on doing as much DPS as possible.

Now multiply that by five. Our warrior doesn't have to worry about anything but threat and mitigation--she never has to do solo quests. The priest doesn't have to worry about building a set of damage gear, because he always has the rogue, shaman and mage to do damage for him. So each of us invests completely in what we're designed to do, and as a result we can breeze through content that's supposed to be way too difficult for us.

An example: When we hit 58, we all agreed that we would go straight to Hellfire Ramparts. We wouldn't stop and do any of the early Outland quests to bring our gear up to snuff--we'd just dive straight in and see how we fared against Vazruden and Nazan as fresh 58s with no Outland gear whatsoever. Well, we did wipe once when the priest couldn't get his Greater Heal off in time, but other than that it was a breeze.

Another example: back in the day, the 5 of us ran Uldaman together. Now this was back when Archaedas was still a level 47, instead of the level 40 he is now. At the time, Jasica (the tank) and Sabrielle (the rogue) were level 43, and everyone else was level 42. If you know your mob difficulty colors you know that this means that Jasica and Sabrielle are still in orange territory, while everyone else is red.

Now Archaedas is the highest level mob in the instance--everyone else is level 46 or lower. This puts the rest of the instance in no better than orange territory for the whole group, so with our gear and our experience working together, we never actually noticed any special difficulty until we reached Archaedas. But the difference between a mob that is orange to you and a mob that is red to you is a huge difference.

Well, the tank was still orange so he held aggro just fine. Archaedas was red to the healer, but the healer didn't need to worry about his level--all he had to do was heal the tank. So our defensive positions were working just fine. But out of the three DPS classes, only one of them was high enough level that Archaedas was orange--everyone else was missing about 75% of the time. The shaman missed with so many Lightning Bolts that she gave up trying, and just healed the tank so that Rotgurgle could take a break to regenerate mana. I, meanwhile, just missed my Fireball over and over and over again. We were damaging him so slowly that I had time to run myself out of mana, cast Evocation, run out of mana again, use a , run out of mana again, use my Mana Jade, run out of mana again, and cast Evocationagain before our combined healers ran out of steam, and we wiped.

I still get kind of frustrated about that fight, because I know that we could have finished him off if we hadn't had that arbitrary level restriction. If you expanded the game's requirements so that bosses were orange to people six levels below them and not five, we would have taken him easily. But because Blizzard had arbitrarily set that restriction at five levels, we were stuck in Uldaman until we got that extra level--and Uldaman is not a fun place to be stuck. :P

I like this group because it lets me experience all the game's instance content, but at my own pace and with friends I trust to be patient with me if I've had a hard day. Sure, we don't get to run together as often as I'd like--but the runs make up for it. Here are the instances we've cleared so far:

And now we're headed off together into the rest of Outland. We're hoping to hit Blood Furnace next week--I'll let you know how it goes.

So what about you? Is there anyone else out there who levels like this? Do you enjoy it, or find it too restrictive? How do you handle tradeskills? Does anyone want to give it a shot? Maybe someone in this comment thread will want to reroll with you... ;)

Comments

Comment by psiclone57

on 2009/03/13 01:31:28

So, this actually gonna happen? What server? What faction?What time we gonna meet up?These are the questions . . . Oh, and I wanna be a warrior, but if you're gonna tank, I guess I'll be a dps warrior.

Comment by Deadraider

on 2009/03/13 11:04:52

So we need one more. And since doublediamond410 is going to heal ill make my shaman ele.

Comment by Vernadris

on 2009/03/13 13:14:54

Wow... i want that.

I would gladly quit Raiding in an blink of an eye if i found a group like that.

Maybe we could open a Topic just to form those kind of groups? I miss the old Instances so much, Temple of Atal'Hakar for me is just the best instance ever created.

And by the way, i have experience Healing, DPSing and Tanking in that order, if someone is willing to form another group, i'm insterested.

Comment by Niona

on 2009/03/13 13:47:51

Its not exactly the same, but our guild was set up to do stuff like this. We had five people and we all experimented with roles to see what people liked to do. But then our main tank left and one of our other friends transferred to take his place. Our main healer left, so I leveled a priest. And one of our dps doesn't play anymore.

So all that's left is me, leveling a DK with an 80 Holy Priest, my friend (a great tank, the one who transferred) an 80 prot warrior, and a newly joined hunter 74. I say "newly joined" because this guild is a couple years old.

But we all are trying to get our alts to 80 so we have options, but we already have a healer and tank used to working with each other, even if the DPS needs a little work. ;)

There's something about leveling with real life friends that makes the game more interesting to me.

Comment by Deadraider

on 2009/03/13 13:59:14

Wow... i want that.

I would gladly quit Raiding in an blink of an eye if i found a group like that.

Maybe we could open a Topic just to form those kind of groups? I miss the old Instances so much, Temple of Atal'Hakar for me is just the best instance ever created.

And by the way, i have experience Healing, DPSing and Tanking in that order, if someone is willing to form another group, i'm insterested.

Read above. I guess your in if you want to join.

Comment by Vernadris

on 2009/03/13 14:21:14

Read above. I guess your in if you want to join.

Oh sorry, i thought that group was closed.

So the group is:L33tsauce (Druid Tank)psiclone57 (Warrior DPS)Deadraider (Shammy unknown build)doublediamond410 (Healer unkown class)And me, if i'm accepted. I'll play what fits best in the group, probably a Mage.

Ok but first, i play on Warsong, WoW-US as Horde. I don't care playing on another server and as Ally, altough i'd prefer to stay Horde if possible, but i can't play on WoW-EU.

What about you guys?I'm usually online around 9:00 PM until 1:00AM at GMT -05:00.

Comment by Deadraider

on 2009/03/13 19:10:10

I can do it for a while after 4:00 EST. And Ill do horde. Always wanted a troll shammy.

Comment by kamodius

on 2009/03/13 19:20:19

I'm a latecomer to raiding, only been playing for about a year. Our guild has a rank that's for friends/family/nonraiders, and there's a bit of a barrier to get upward and into raiding for me (time-zone differences, mostly).

I found 4 other people in roughly the same boat as I, and because we felt like the "red-headed step children" of the guild, we started calling ourselves the RHSG (Red-Headed Step-Group). have the rhsg channel we all join on login, etc. We all have multiple characters and we prefer doing instance runs within the group whenever possible.

One of our members' sister joined WoW recently, and she and I have been "static grouping" our way from 62 (her DK and my mage), only really questing when we're both online. It takes some of the "grind" out of it, and goes a heck of a lot faster. We recently started doing the same with a couple of our alts, also, a 21 warlock (her) and my 22 priest. Planning on static-grouping these two all the way to 80, as well. Very enjoyable, and I highly recommend it. It's much less frustrating than soloing 1-80, always feeling the push to level faster.

Comment by thunderawolf

on 2009/03/13 19:28:31

What an interesting Idea :DI liked it i immeditaly struck it up with two friends of mine.

I'm currently recruiting on my fourm about it.

If anyone here is interested feel free to send me an email.

Cinderwolf732@Yahoo.com

Comment by thunderawolf

on 2009/03/13 20:46:30

XD I wish you luck on yar group :3

Comment by doublediamond410

on 2009/03/14 11:15:52

Doublediamond410@hotmail.com

Just name the realm and I'm in.

Edit --- went ahead and made a female Belf pally named Malanore on the Thrall realm, if there's any changes lemme know

Comment by Deadraider

on 2009/03/14 18:18:49

I made a troll shammy named Mcfuzzle

Comment by L33tsauce

on 2009/03/14 18:35:05

Alright! Now we just need Vernadris and psiclone57 to make their toons.

Comment by Vernadris

on 2009/03/15 11:55:05

I changed my role, depending on what our 4th player will be.

Obviously we need a Cloth wearer, otherwise all those nice Cloth itens will go to waste, if psiclone57 comes and goes as a War i'll keep the Mage, otherwise i'll go as a Hunter or something else that would benefit the party most.

We'll need an Enchanter too.

Comment by thunderawolf

on 2009/03/15 13:30:48

My group still needs one more.(any DPS) we would roll horde on the Icecrown PvE server

Comment by Vernadris

on 2009/03/16 09:36:35

Well, i added Ghettobear, Mcfuzzle and Malanore to my Friends list with Kaltherr, my Mage. But i was thinking about the play time, usually i'm at home only around 9:00PM EST, sometimes maybe at 8:00PM, but it's still a short amount of time compared to you guys.

We can still try, ofc, but looks like my playtime will hinder our progress. If you can find someone that suits better with the playtime you guys are looking for, i'll perfectly understand.

Comment by Karashk

on 2009/03/16 11:37:05

Sadly, eventhough I'd love to help you guys, I'm EU-bound and therefore can't be any help to you.

Best of wishes to you, I hope it works out.

Comment by doublediamond410

on 2009/03/16 23:29:58

Actually, 9pm EST works fine for me. Hope the same for everyone else.

Also, the friend from my other static group (on Baelgun realm) said he'd be interesting in rolling a horde dps toon, so he could be our 5th if that spot is still open. (It'd be his first dedicated Horde character and he really wants to run Ragefire Chasm, Shadowfang Keep, etc., which are tougher as Alliance characters).